Stephanie Comilang: Float
Two recent films by Berlin-based Stephanie Comilang that narrate the lives of overseas Filipino workers, complicating documentary forms with references to science fiction
The exhibition features two recent films by the Berlin-based artist. In her practice, Stephanie’s documentary based works create narratives that look at how our understandings of mobility, capital, and labour on a global scale are shaped through various cultural and social factors.
While “Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso” documents intentional gestures of care and community that help collapse the distance from home and soothe the heartache of separation from kin and culture, land and language, “Diaspora Ad Astra” portrays the melancholy and isolation that typifies the life of all migrants, for whom home always remains a paradise lost.
The show follows “The Stonebreakers” in the four part series “Substructures: Excavating the Everyday.” The series, curated by Murtaza Vali, investigates some of the infrastructures that shape the spaces, contours and rhythms of Gulf urbanism, revealing forms and networks so embedded within the Khaleeji quotidian that they are commonly overlooked.
